All I want to do tonight is digest the very disappointing Mexican food I mistakenly consumed earlier today. You drive 45 minutes, thinking of all your dining choices, and settle on one: Indulgent-but-worth-it Mexican, at a place you know that makes fine tacos and with a liquor license to serve the margarita you really crave. And then what happens? The place seems to have changed hands, or changed mindsets, or done something to make the beef chewy, the chips stale, and the whole experience so, so disappointing.
I’m going to correct myself with salads and vegetables tomorrow, delicious ones. Money spent eating bad food out always taste bitter.
So, the bloggage:
Chris Christie, it’s all over. What do you see when you look in the mirror?
Sun Tzu: Never interrupt your enemy when he’s destroying himself.
So, found and arrested within hours. Another loser. Why am I not surprised? Testosterone poisoning is a real thing.
Let’s hope for forward progress tomorrow, eh?
Dexter said on September 20, 2016 at 1:27 am
I used to eat at Mexican joints once in a while. Forty years ago there was a place on Calhoun in FWA called Blackie’s. I’d drive thirty-five miles once a week to sit there and eat one of their burritos. When I quit alcohol, I lost my desire for Mexican food. While our middle daughter (the one who hopes to move to Miami before next spring) shares nance’s love for what she calls “margs”, I never wanted to ruin a good shot of tequila by mixing it with Cointreau, limes and crushed ice. I would just drink it straight with a beer back. However, between the two, I always ordered a shot of mezcal. We here (Bryan, Ohio) have an excellent Mexican restaurant but I only go there when family members show up and want that stuff. And they do make excellent juevos rancheros. For the record, I have never found a burrito even close to Blackie’s. Knowing my current disdain for Mexican grub, we only ate in one such place in Encinitas, and I had an excellent fish taco. A first, as in my sheltered life I had never had the pleasure of eating a taco that cost $11.50.
Chris Christie, say it ain’t so. So now what? People of New Jersey have had their fill of him , and long ago.
Strapped. Last spring a plumber came to our house and as I was writing the big-ass check when he was done, we discussed firearms. He lives right on the OH-MI line and said when hes not on company time he always wears a holstered pistol, and he said he shops the stores around Jonesville and Hillsdale and he said many people carry weapons openly there. I retorted that I had never seen anyone carrying in any store, Walmart or smaller establishment…now all has changed. I hadn’t been in the local Subway sandwich shoppe for several years until last week. The late-20’s customer ahead of me had his 4-year old daughter in tow and he was strapped with a hand cannon. I happened to be wearing my Vietnam Veteran cap and he saw it and thanked me for my service ( I get that every time I wear that hat…strange it feels) and I noticed he was what “Tommy” in Shawshank Redemption called Elmo Blatch—“a twitchy bastard”. He blinked incessantly and kept that hand near that pistol grip. Oh shit, they’re in my neighborhood, ready to rock and roll. I guess a rod comes in handy when you’re a semi-retired Minnesota cop, shopping in a mall and a maniac lunges at you with a knife, intent on mayhem. Why, you just empty that service weapon into that motherfucker until he’s damn-shore daid. Good show, jolly good.
Then you have a female cop who gets all wigged out and kills an African American father of four who is walking with his hands up in the sky, totally unarmed….said he would not comply with police commands. Well, I guess maybe some more folks now know why Kaepernick wears socks depicting cops as pigs. Some, anyway.
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Suzanne said on September 20, 2016 at 6:40 am
It is a sad state of affairs when the powers that be want to punish someone like Kasich for stating the obvious that the empower has no clothes.
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basset said on September 20, 2016 at 7:14 am
Plenty of good Mexican restaurants and food trucks in Nashville, also Honduran, Salvadoran, and others. Much larger Hispanic population here than you might expect.
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adrianne said on September 20, 2016 at 7:32 am
The ongoing story about the Chelsea bomb (exploded four blocks from my office) is so New York that I don’t know where to begin. The two guys who disabled the second bomb because they wanted to steal the luggage? The revelation of the ongoing feud between NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio and NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo? (Cuomo didn’t show up for the news conference announcing his arrest). I worked from home Monday because I didn’t want to deal with the fallout. Today, going into the office. Otherwise, the terrorists win.
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alex said on September 20, 2016 at 7:36 am
So Kasich can’t be taken at his word if he goes back on his meaningless, coerced pledge to support the nominee? He’s the only one of the sixteen GOP presidential candidates who has demonstrated any amount of integrity in this election cycle. In fact, I thought it was quite fitting that Christie was out hawking Trump’s birther revisionism yesterday just as his own biggest lies were blowing up under his fat ass.
If Trump supporters are aggrieved about politicians who refuse to be accountable, what the fuck do they hope to accomplish by electing the most pathological liar of them all?
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 20, 2016 at 7:43 am
Politically, the received wisdom has always been that winning is a solvent. An electoral victory dissolves all manner of sins and washes them away. And its counterpart is that no one ever supported a loser.
This election is taking all kinds of received wisdom and tossing it into the dustbin of history.
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Suzanne said on September 20, 2016 at 7:46 am
Alex @ 5, if you can figure that out, I will vote for you! It completely mystifies me. People won’t vote for Hillary because she can’t be trusted but will support a man who lies more often than I visit the ladies room. His lies are OK because his lies say something they want to hear?
The older I get, the more I realize how much people make up their own reality.
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nancy said on September 20, 2016 at 9:03 am
It’s ridiculous that Priebus should be enforcing this party-loyalty pledge when it was his own failed attempt to keep Donald Trump from running as a third-party candidate, one that blew up in his face.
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Deborah said on September 20, 2016 at 9:36 am
The NY/NJ bomber is indeed a loser. He had at least 2 brothers named Mohammed, one with a Q and one with a K. That reminded me of the TV show a while back where the guy would introduce his bothers “this is my brother Daryl and this is my other brother Daryl”.
Yesterday we hosted some neighbors in Abiquiu to our place in Chicago for brunch. They were in town for a memorial service on Sunday for a relative. So, because these neighbors were going to see our place we had to spiff it up by finally getting our art pieces hung on the walls. Something we had been putting off doing because it turns us into the Bickerson’s. Our marriage survived the ordeal.
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brian stouder said on September 20, 2016 at 9:39 am
…and speaking of things blowing up – a small question:
when did the Republican party become “anti-Establishment”?
What does that even mean?
In the 1960’s/’70’s – “anti-Establishment” covered an entirely different spectrum of opinion (anti-war, pro-civil rights, including for women), yes?
And Trump’s “anti-establishment” pose seems to be shorthand for religious discrimination, re-segregation, anti-public schools (or more correctly – redirecting the public money for schools into the pockets of for-profit charters and the like, with no local oversight), and – generally – pro-war/pro-torture/pro-barbarian.
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Julie Robinson said on September 20, 2016 at 10:23 am
Alex, knowing your love of the Indiana Tech Law School, I thought you would appreciate this: http://www.journalgazette.net/news/local/Of-12-Indiana-Tech-law-school-grads–1-passes-bar-exam-15344461
Of 20 grads, 12 took the bar exam, and one passed. Ouch.
Mexican food is so cheap and easy to fix at home that I never understand going out for it, unless it’s to meet friends or family.
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Deborah said on September 20, 2016 at 10:40 am
I’m so spoiled with regard to Mexican food having spent so much time in NM where there is no comparison to the swill you get in most other places. My favorite place in Santa Fe is Pasqual’s on Water St, they have the best Huevos Rancheros ever. Chicago has a couple of good places too, run by Rick Bayless. My favorite one here is Xoco, we used to go every Saturday morning for breakfast before it got so popular. If you’re visiting Chicago you really need to try it, they have great sandwiches and soups too.
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Bitter Scribe said on September 20, 2016 at 10:50 am
I have never understood why Chris Christie thought his Sergeant Schulz defense–“I knew nothing”–would get him through Bridgegate. If you take him at his word, it means he was incompetent enough to hire and promote vindictive assholes, then obliviously let them carry out their vindictive schemes under his nose. Of course, I don’t take him at his word at all.
Also, has there ever been a better name for a criminal defense attorney than “Baldassare”? The only way to improve on it would be “Baldfacedliar.”
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brian stouder said on September 20, 2016 at 11:02 am
Bitter Scribe, for the win!
Re southwestern food: We love Don Chava’s on Wells Street, in Fort Wayne.
And, to be totally honest, Taco Hell has steadily risen on my list – when you might otherwise grab a burger & fries.
For the same dollars, they have strips of steak (rather than ground beef) in several of their items – plus Diet Pepsi on the fountain….
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 11:16 am
Christie and one of the vindictive assholes went to high school together. The high school classmate is now the star witness for the prosecution.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/09/david-wildstein-chris-christie-bridgegate-trial.html
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Danny said on September 20, 2016 at 11:23 am
Brad an Angelina are back on the market. Alex, you and Nance can fight over Brad. I’ll offer to comfort Angie.
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 11:32 am
Donald Jr is definitely in the basket, with his penchant for tweeting out white supremacist memes. Once or twice might be an accident, but there’s an ugly pattern. Is he jealous of his brother-in-law?
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/09/trump-jrs-skittles-tweet-is-based-on-two-different-white-supremacist-memes/
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Heather said on September 20, 2016 at 11:33 am
I wonder if Jennifer Aniston is feeling some Schadenfreude today.
I just went to a Mexican place blocks from my home that I’d been meaning to check out for a while, called Ixcateco. It’s run by a guy who used to work for Rick Bayless, so it’s more in that vein, but BYOB and much more modest (my neighborhood is far from hip). I had some lamb with mole sauce and it was amazing.
I don’t even know what to say about the Republicans anymore, except their ability to twist their reasoning to manage cognitive dissonance is almost truly beyond compare.
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 11:43 am
“Millennials, our phones are in our hands,” he said. “Technology, information is at reach. Based off of the information that I was finding with reference to Clinton’s past, I just didn’t see her as a candidate I could trust.” Allen liked Sanders’s brand of progressive politics more than Clinton’s and said he was “frightened” by the continuing revelations about her emails.
Many of the young black voters who are lukewarm about Clinton agreed with her policy proposals but either were not aware of them or, even more critically, were not aware of how often she had spoken out about issues like race and policing or had met with organizers like Mothers of the Movement, a group of black parents whose children were killed by police.
It doesn’t help to have access to information always in your hand if all you do is look for the information someone else has told you to look for.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/black-millennials-arent-united-behind-clinton-like-their-elders/
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 11:59 am
So is Trump really, really cheap, or really, really broke?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-used-258000-from-his-charity-to-settle-legal-problems/2016/09/20/adc88f9c-7d11-11e6-ac8e-cf8e0dd91dc7_story.html
Someone should raise some questions and look for some clouds about the $50 million he allegedly self-funded his primary with (and which he seems to be clawing back by overcharging for use of all his properties during the general). Was it really his money? Did someone fund him off the books?
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 12:09 pm
I bet Tom Waits’ wife has a name, too, headline writers, and if she won an award as well, maybe you could acknowledge her as something other than his wife.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/tom-waits-others-to-be-honored-with-songwriting-award/2016/09/19/88e55c9e-7e26-11e6-ad0e-ab0d12c779b1_story.html?postshare=9911474383866138&tid=ss_tw
Are we going to see these headlines?
Former President Clinton’s Wife Elected President
Grandmother Elected to Highest Office
Wife of Former Resident Moves into White House
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brian stouder said on September 20, 2016 at 12:10 pm
Sherri – if this was a teevee miniseries, then the thread would lead back to….the Clinton foundation!
Maybe even throw in a cryptic reference in one of Sec Clinton’s emails to ‘funding that idiot’ to wrench the Republican primaries…
an homage to Frankenstein (or Fronkensteen)
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brian stouder said on September 20, 2016 at 12:22 pm
and by the way –
if I was gonna design a tee-shirt, it would have an image of the preamble to the Constitution (“We the People” in big quill-pen letters) – and the caption –
“nothing wrong with being POLITICALLY CORRECT“
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Connie said on September 20, 2016 at 12:22 pm
Here in the suburbs we recently discovered that a local downscale coney island had a secret Mexican menu. So now we go to Rudy’s Pancake House and ask for the Rudy’s Mexican Grill menu. Excellent food, both familiar and unfamiliar dishes.
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Jakash said on September 20, 2016 at 12:39 pm
2 things making the rounds. The Prez trying to fire folks up with a personal appeal and insistence that they vote (about 3 min.):
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4620505/president-obama-cbc-speech-2016-vote
Seth Meyers with “a closer look”, a passionate take-down of Rumpelthinskin’s birther nonsense (second video down at this link) (about 10 minutes):
http://uproxx.com/tv/late-nigh-seth-meyers-donald-trump-birther-lies/
Punch line:
Rump: “…Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”
Meyers: “Obama was born in the Unites States, period? Fuck you, exclamation point!”
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 1:09 pm
Evan Osnos looks past all the racism and noise of the Trump campaign to make an educated guess at what a Trump presidency would look like: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/president-trumps-first-term
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 1:46 pm
The whole Manchin family appeRs to have been in on the EpiPen graft. Never been a Manchin fan anyway, for policy reasons, but had no idea about this degree of corruption.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2016/09/20/family-matters-epipens-had-help-getting-schools-manchin-bresch/90435218/
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Dexter said on September 20, 2016 at 1:54 pm
Sherri, you made my day with the link to WaPo. I was introduced to Tom Waits’ art around 1983 and made a quest to buy everything he ever recorded. I did fairly well, even found some European bootlegs from a record store clerk in Ann Arbor who knew how to get them. Now I just load everything to Spotify and I listen to a few tunes every day. Tom was dating Rickie Lee Jones then suddenly they split and Tom has been with Kathleen Brennan ever since. Maybe the headline writer offended you, but KB is held in exalted status by we Tom and Kathleen fans. I have driven long distance treks to see Waits concerts. I am the same age as Bruce Springsteen (he’ll be 67 come Friday) and Tom (he’ll be 67 on Pearl Harbor Day) so it was easy to keep in stride with them as we all age too quickly. And then, OMG—Elvis Costello was there, and I am a big fan of his (and equally so a fan of Diane Krall, his jazz singing lovely wife) and also John Prine? I have followed Prine’s career since he threw down his USPS mailbag and got gigs and turned pro. At least since 1974, maybe before. What a night that must have been. I regret I wasn’t even aware of the event…my bad.
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Deborah said on September 20, 2016 at 2:25 pm
If someone has already posted this forgive me, I missed it. James Fallows on the upcoming debates. Long but excellent http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/who-will-win/497561/
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alex said on September 20, 2016 at 2:30 pm
Chicago has a couple of good places too, run by Rick Bayless.
Frontalobampo. (To give them the Brangelina treatment.)
Julie, I saw the Indiana Tech story in the state bar e-newsletter. And I hear that our semi-literate one-term school board member and all-around right-wing gadfly Jon Olinger is among the graduating class. Poor schmuck’s out a hundred grand and the state’s attorney general is one of his professors. There oughtta be a law.
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Deborah said on September 20, 2016 at 4:44 pm
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/colbert-trump-birther-liar
That link includes a hilarious video by Colbert about Trump’s birther announcement.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 20, 2016 at 4:46 pm
Re: “forward progress” — this picture & sentiment is on my door at my juvenile court office.
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Kirk said on September 20, 2016 at 4:48 pm
Bitter Scribe@13:
Before I went to work at the Columbus Dispatch, the paper carried a number of stories about some local criminals named Baldassaro. But the puritan Dispatch came up with its own spelling. In what was then the paper’s very thin stylebook, there was an entry decreeing that it always be spelled Baldasaro. The real reason was so that, if the name were hyphenated, it would never come out in print as “Baldass-.”
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 5:51 pm
Elizabeth Warren had her some roasted bank executive today. Charles Pierce with the highlights: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a48758/elizabeth-warren-banking-committee-wells-fargo/
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David C. said on September 20, 2016 at 6:37 pm
Deborah @ 9. I liked the Bickersons reference. It probably flies over most people’s heads, but I remember seeing Bob and Ray references here, so it fits in nicely for this crowd.
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 9:00 pm
For all that Palo Alto is the heart of Silicon Valley, it’s always been reluctant to embrace the future as a town. The Bay Area as a whole has dropped the ball on working regionally to address housing and transportation issues, but Palo Alto has really stood out in their resistance. That was true 26 years ago when I lived there for a year and a half before buying a house in Mountain View, and it’s true now.
A few weeks ago I posted the open letter from the planning commissioner in Palo Alto who was resigning because even though she was a lawyer and her husband was a software engineer, they had no chance of affording a house in Palo Alto. Now, the New York Times has this article about the difficulty restaurants have in surviving in Palo Alto. Some of the problems are because of planning choices Palo Alto makes, like requiring any restaurant renting more than 1000 sq. ft. to provide 4 parking spaces or pay in lieu fees that are the highest in the country. But when you resist density and resist transit and refuse to change anything in the name of “preserving character”, in a place where jobs outnumber places to live by a factor of over 3 to 1, then housing becomes out of reach for anybody who doesn’t win the tech stock roulette, and only high end restaurants and chains can afford to operate.
It’s sad, because Palo Alto really is a beautiful city, but I watched the dot com bubble eliminate many of the restaurants that I liked there, and it sounds like the rest are being wiped out. There was a reason we deliberately bought in Mountain View rather than Palo Alto, and it wasn’t just the price difference.
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 9:33 pm
The Public Editor of the NYTimes, even while defending the Times’ use of “lie” with regards to Trump’s birtherism, still thinks that the use of lie, even when factually correct, “feels partisan.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/public-editor/trump-birther-lie-liz-spayd-public-editor.html?rref=collection%2Fcolumn%2Fthe-public-editor&action=click&contentCollection=opinion®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection
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alex said on September 20, 2016 at 10:38 pm
I think Ms. Spayd is a bigger dissembler than any political candidate, Republican or Democrat. At least she appears to be coming down on the right side of the birtherism issue, for the moment, anyway. I don’t envy her position as an ombudsman for a supposedly liberal newspaper that’s trying to overcompensate for its reputation in this election cycle. Wish she’d grow a pair (or maybe a snatch) and quit equivocating so ridiculously about journalism ethics as I always understood them.
Regarding the above about Palo Alto, my dad managed a real estate portfolio that included partnership in the 1970s in an exquisite Palo Alto Hotel designed by architect Clement Chen, who became a personal friend of our family. It was quite an eye-opener to learn in the 1990s that its workers were commuting from at the least some 40 miles or more because no one who worked there could afford to live anywhere near it, particularly the lowest-paid but most essential of staff. California real estate is almost as nutty as New York journalism to a bona fide midwesterner like me.
And there’s my two cents’ worth for today.
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Jolene said on September 20, 2016 at 10:47 pm
FLOTUS will be on The Late Show w/ Stephen Colbert tonight. Clips online afterward, I’m sure.
Hillary was on Fallon last night. Though she was charming on Kimmel a couple weeks ago, last night’s appearance was, to me, flat and dull. A clear case of trying too hard.
Here’s a question re her campaign that has me puzzled. When she took time due to her pneumonia, she mentioned being glad to have a bit of time at home with her dogs. She mentioned her dogs again last night. Have we seen her dogs or heard anything about them–what their names are or what kind they are?
I know it’s stupid–a stupid pet trick, if you will–but I think she should be using them in the campaign. People love dogs, and showing affection for pets is a humanizing act–a way to connect to show warmth and connect to other people. I’m actually curious about the dogs. Bring those bow-wows out, Hillary!
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Sherri said on September 20, 2016 at 10:53 pm
Alex, it wasn’t only the lowest paid staff. When I lived there in the 90s, I knew even engineers who commuted from Livermore, Tracy, Pleasanton, Gilroy, Santa Cruz. All of those but Gilroy required commuting over mountains (small mountains, but still, nasty roads.) There were shuttles from Livermore, and Caltrain was eventually extended to Gilroy, improving those commutes, but I was eternally grateful that we never endured those kind of commutes.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 22, 2016 at 10:13 pm
Jolene: http://presidentialpetmuseum.com/blog/hillary-clinton-pets/
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on September 22, 2016 at 10:18 pm
Sherri, that article in Palo Alto from the NYTimes I’ve already sent to all the members of the Board of Zoning and Building Appeals I chair. Parking variances are our most regularly contentious subject, and I’ve fruitlessly tried to provoke the mayor and/or council into talking about what we really want in our downtown district versus what the ordinances technically call for.
Our BZBA is a hoot to chair; on our panel, I have a former chair of the Federal Election Commission (R) and a former President pro tempore of our state Senate (D), so the five of us can pretty much wrap our heads around everything except what the heck village council actually wants us to do. For the record, unless a neighboring property owner objects with any sort of substantial concern, we want to allow property owners to do what they will. But the complex formulae of square footage, function, and parking spaces associated with the permitted use — it would take the Supremes, and all nine of them at that, to resolve our discussions.
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